MIT and NASA unveil a brand new kind of airplane wing that could change how we fly

A team from NASA and MIT has created a new type of airplane wing — and it could make air travel far more efficient.

In a paper published in the journal Smart Materials and Structures on Monday, the researchers describe how they built an airplane wing from hundreds of identical, lightweight cube-like structures, all bolted together and then covered with a thin polymer material.

The design allows the wing to change shape automatically, adjusting itself to whatever configuration is optimal for the current phase of flight — with one configuration for take-off, for example, and another for landing.

Bigger And Better

The wing the researchers created and tested for the new paper is about the same size as what you’d find on a single-seater plane, according to MIT News, but they’d already demonstrated their design’s feasibility with a smaller wing several years ago.

Not only does this new wing show that the concept scales up to a size that could carry a person, but it also demonstrates a new manufacturing process that cuts the time needed to produce each individual structure down from several minutes to just 17 seconds.